I was sent away to go to Blue Quills school, and I was just a little kid, five years old. So, I had to go stay in the school and I was ahead of some of my classmates because I knew how to write, this and that, and I had learned English at the Charles Camsell Hospital.
The most awful time in classes was my grade three, I had a teacher from hell. In grade three, it was really hard for me to go to the classroom. I would be almost throwing up, getting sick because I was so scared of the teacher.
So I had to spend my time in the chapel because the nun said that I deserved the wickedness that I had in my life and that’s how I’m paying for it and that I had to spend it in the chapel. And if they couldn’t put me in the chapel, I was put in the stairwell.
I just want to talk about the hair thing again, and how it was very hard to… I can still feel the hair being cut on my head, on my head… and my head being shaved and having to be herded off to the showers and being scrubbed. When I got older, I was also […]
When we got to Blue Quills, we were herded into this cave, I’d never seen such a huge cave, I didn’t know at the time that it was a gym. It had big windows on the top but none that you could look out, it was very scary.
Those times I wanted to run away, I couldn’t because I’m crippled. I don’t get very far. And I remember a time when my brother, and sister ran away together. It was, there was four of them. But my brother and sister they were all caught and brought back…
Not in public but they had the classroom doors open, they had a stool they’re out in the hallway and they put me there and they gave it to me. They had the doors open so other students can hear me cry out.
Things like that happened all… just anytime…
We were not allowed to speak our language. If we were… if some staff member overheard us, they would report us, and we would go to court or whatever he [likely referring to the principal] called it, because we were not allowed to speak our language. We were supposed to lose our language,
There was a big room like this with cots and we each had our own little cot, and at nights, some nights there’ll be full moon. So I used to go to the window and look at the moon, and I talk to the moon. I used to ask the moon, “if you’re, if you are shining on my parents? Are you the same moon, shining on my parents?”
But anyway, my first experience really was loneliness, because I was taken away from a place where I was loved. All of us, all my siblings were loved very much by our parents and to me they were model parents. But anyway, I missed all that.